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Good review. I am looking forward to mini-ITX board reviews in the future (hopefully there are some coming)... This is exactly what needs to be analyzed in this class of reviews. This flaw is a good find that an OEM may be aware of, but a retail customer would discover it through a negative experience.Reply

Can you elaborate on why this "power delivery" issue would or could happen or post a link to somewhere that discusses the issue? It seems odd to me that replacing a higher power chip (100W Richland) with a lower power chip (65W or 95W Kaveri) would create a heat generation issue.

Is it a flaw in the Kaveri chip or just a different design which taxes the motherboard differently? If it's a flaw in the Kaveri design, is it something likely to be fixed by before Carrizo or is just a minor glitch to be fixed by a revision?

Considering you can buy a Z77 motherboard with minimal heatsinks on the power delivery circuitry (Z77-D3H comes to mind) that will happily run a 95W Sandy Bridge CPU at a 4GHz overclock without extra cooling, this is very concerning. It sounds to me like either AMD or board manufacturers are cheaping out on power delivery, or AMD has (yet again) engineered a turkey. Would appreciate if AnandTech could investigate and get to the bottom of this.Reply

On the Conclusion page, "Performance is consummate with other FM2+..." - the word should probably be "commensurate".

I realize that many will go for the high-end Kaveri APU, but is the power delivery on the current crop of A88X boards really intended (or just better-suited) for the 45W/65W parts instead?

Per the comment on the opening page, I've been thinking about buying/building a Thin-ITX/NUC/Brix-sized system for general home use, and Kaveri (or maybe the next generation) seems to augur well for being able to do this at a modest power (and cooling) budget. Vendors will really have to get the cooling solutions sorted out, though.Reply

My assumption is that PS2 ports are still used in industrial computing. They are also a little bit cheaper. Last I checked, HP would cut about $5 or so off the price if you went with a PS2 keyboard over USB. If you're a corporate purchasing agent buying 1000 systems, that's an nontrivial amount of cash with practically no downside.Reply

It was an half-joke. No, I think the real reasons are that the PS/2 controller is integrated and fully functional on all chipsets and PS/2 keyboards are guaranteed to always work, especially on BIOS. Call it a failsafe solutionReply

So how about an AMD Kaveri-supporting A88X motherboard priced at just £40? That would surely get some attention, right? The MSI A88XM-E35 is that board and we have it under the spotlight today. http://is.gd/mGuvSUReply

The first thing I noticed when taking the motherboard out of the anti-static bag was the lack of a power delivery heatsink.What heatsink is that???????????Isn't it the little blue thing on the mobo?Reply

I would like to see these smaller form factor boards with more PCI-express 4x type slots, rather than the PCI slot. This MSI board is perfect in every way for an upcoming build, except for the PCI slot. It's the deal breaker.Good review, thanks for your hard work.Reply